What's New: Version 3 of these data offers an improvement in the imputation strategy for household wealth values.

The Prospective Social Security Wealth Measures of Pre-Retirees data set consists of respondent-level, cross-sectional files constructed from the employment sections of the HRS 1992 (wave 1), HRS 1998 (wave 4), HRS 2004 (wave 7) and the restricted SSA summary and detailed earnings and benefits files. From these data, we calculate the value of Social Security wealth at different ages (at early retirement age, normal retirement age and age 70). We impute values for individuals not linked to the SSA earnings files.

The public version of these data consists of the following main variables:

Respondent's predicted SS wealth at different ages based on own retirement insurance benefit;

Spouse's predicted SS wealth at different ages based on own retirement insurance benefit;

Household predicted SS wealth at different ages based on both respondent's and spouse's own retirement insurance benefit, incremental spouse benefit, and incremental widow benefit.

These data are available for 1992, 1998, and 2004 in a single flat file with variables named following the RAND naming conventions to facilitate use with RAND files.